Eight months ago, Ash Regan was a contender for the leadership of the SNP, alongside Kate Forbes and eventual winner Humza Yousaf. Today she quit the party, defected to Alex Salmond’s rival Alba, and becomes that outfit’s first ever MSP. In a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter, Regan said it had ‘become increasingly clear that the SNP has lost its focus on independence, the very foundation of its existence’. She added that she ‘could not, in good conscience, continue to be part of a party that has drifted from its path and its commitment to achieving independence as a matter of urgency’.
Regan won Edinburgh East under the SNP banner in 2016 but became increasingly disaffected by the party leadership under Nicola Sturgeon and her successor Yousaf. She resigned as one of Sturgeon’s ministers last October rather than back the gender bill, becoming the first minister in the history of the Scottish parliament to quit on a matter of conscience. She would go on to give an impassioned speech against the Bill on the floor of Holyrood. Her leadership bid was quixotic, pledging that she would treat 50 per cent of the vote plus one for the SNP and other pro-independence parties at any election as a mandate to enter secession negotiations with the UK government. She was less clear on what she would do if the UK government told her to do one.
Regan’s defection, and the almost daily signs of conflict and tension inside the party, is an indication of just how thoroughly — and quickly — the SNP has come unravelled.
The SNP is calling for a by-election. Regan’s statement anticipates this by stressing that she was elected ‘on an independence platform’, a jab at Yousaf who used the recent party conference to further dilute independence policy. The SNP says the voters of Edinburgh East elected an SNP MSP; Regan says they voted for a pro-independence manifesto and the SNP has abandoned that. The SNP’s protestations sound a little bloodless, and truth be told a by-election is the last thing they want. The party is faltering in the polls and already lost the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election on a punishing swing, with their vote plummeting 17 percentage points.
The public has still not warmed to Yousaf and his government has been forced to abandon flagship policies like a deposit return scheme and a fishing ban in coastal waters. Costs continue to spiral for the overdue and over-budget ferries project, NHS waiting times remain a horror show and the Scottish government is now under pressure over missing and deleted WhatsApp messages about the response to Covid. Fergus Ewing, a rural MSP from the right, was suspended for failing to back a notoriously incompetent Green minister in a confidence vote at Holyrood. One MP, Angus MacNeil, has been booted out of the party after clashing with the chief whip, and another, Dr Lisa Cameron, has defected to the Tories. There are rumours of further defections to come.
To describe the state of the SNP as a dog’s breakfast would be defamatory to Pedigree Chum. The party has dominated Scottish politics for two decades in part by maintaining a level of discipline that would make Pyongyang military parades look spontaneous by comparison. (The SNP was in government for 15 years before experiencing its first backbench rebellion.) That level of unity is not only gone but seems unimaginable today. Regan’s defection, and the almost daily signs of conflict and tension inside the party, is an indication of just how thoroughly — and quickly — the SNP has come unravelled. At the start of 2023, the party was still untouchable. Now some of its most loyal servants wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
It’s easy to blame all this on Yousaf, for he is fantastically unsuited to leadership, but the real culprit is Sturgeon. After inheriting the party from Salmond, she transformed it into a personality cult, so that even as she kept kicking independence down the road, aware that she would lose another referendum, the rank and file swooned at her every U-turn, compromise and delay. Brexit changed things, creating a renewed urgency for secession that Sturgeon had to echo even as she still lacked a strategy to secure, let alone win, a referendum. Eventually, she was holding the party together by the force of her personality and ever more implausible schemes to deliver the breakaway the SNP has been seeking since 1934. She went too far last year when she placed the constitutional question before the Supreme Court and the justices came back with a unanimous ruling that only Westminster could grant an independence referendum. For Sturgeon at least, it was the end of the road.
Yousaf has no means of taking the nationalist cause beyond where Sturgeon left it, dumped by the side of the road, bloodied and broken after being run over by the Scotland Act. He cannot begin to conjure the spell that she was able to weave for so long. It’s evident that, as things stand today, the SNP is all out of ideas for achieving a Scottish breakaway. Voting for the party is still a way to articulate your belief in independence but it will not — cannot — deliver it. That is too dreadful for some nationalists to contemplate and so, like Regan, they are seeking an alternative political home. Others will stick with the SNP, figuring they’ve worked too long and hard to allow schisms to dash the independence dream. Yousaf needs as many SNP supporters as possible to think along these latter lines. If many more conclude as Ash Regan has done that independence can only be advanced outside the SNP, Yousaf’s leadership will be done for.
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